"I heard someone say just last night that the very lack of problems could cause strife. We're well aware of the hazards of a life like ours."
-- Marian (Liv Ullmann) in Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage"
We never really know what goes on inside someone else's marriage; what might appear to us as natural and relaxed is likely the result of compromise and experiment. Couples keep secrets, invent private languages, and endure intimate indignities. They stay together for as many reasons as they bust up.
It goes without saying that not all marriages are created equal. Some are shams and some are travesties and some are undertaken in the spirit of parody. Some are expedient. Some we respect, some we shake our heads at and sigh.
We all have seen this; we have friends and acquaintances who baffle us. We don't understand the logic or circumstances that led to their current condition. There are unhappy houses filled with violence and fear. There are women who won't leave their husbands because they think they owe it to their children to endure suffering. There are men dying petty deaths each day. And then there are single people who are neither lonely or unhappy.
Some people have unusual needs, and the human capacity for disappointment seems infinite. We see the movies and think our lives should look like them. We grow bored easily, we are convinced of our own specialness, we grant ourselves permission to tell our own truth--never mind that most of what is said in the name of radical honesty is simple and cruel.
I've been married 30 years and don't take it for granted. That's about all I want to say about my situation; I've seen too many columnists wax on about the wonder of their partners only to have the perfect spouse file papers a few months later. It's like a curse.
I didn't expect the documentary "Jason Isbell: Running With Our Eyes Closed," newly streaming on HBO Max, to be a standard music documentary. Isbell was involved, and he's not only a remarkable singer-songwriter but one of the world's most interesting people (among other things, he's the funniest man on Twitter). And for another, it was directed by Sam Jones, who more than 20 years ago made the 21st century's best music documentary, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco."
That film captured not only the making of the alt-country rock band's classic "Yankee Foxtrot Hotel"--an album that was rejected by its record label (who subsequently dropped the band) and is now regarded as one of the greatest of the past few decades--but the meltdown of the relationship between band members Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett. (Bennett was dismissed from the band shortly after the record was finished and died of a fentanyl overdose in May 2009, weeks after suing Tweedy for breach of contract over his time with Wilco.)
Jones set out to document the making of "Reunions," the 2019 album by Isbell with his band the 400 Unit, which only sometimes includes Isbell's wife Amanda Shires on fiddle. As a rock 'n' roll procedural, it's a fascinating glimpse into the record-making and songwriting process (the 400 Unit, named for a Florence, Ala., mental health treatment facility, seems to admit only well-mannered, convivial guys who collaborate instinctively to flesh out the chords and melody sketches Isbell brings into the studio).
The doc also serves as a biographical sketch, limning Isbell's childhood years as a chubby non-football-playing kid ("that, in itself, was enough to get pickles thrown at you in the lunch room," Isbell remembers) to protean rock guitarist who was drafted into the Drive-By Truckers when he was 22 (most of the rest of the band members were about a decade older).
It also delves into Isbell's well-documented problems with alcohol, his firing from the Truckers for being drunker than they were, and the divorce of his parents, which served as fodder for Isbell's remarkable ballad "Dreamsicle." (There's a clip of Isbell as a preteen in a Black Crowes T-shirt playing Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" on a Strat. Isbell talks about how he retreated to his room to play when his parents argued; a turned-up amp could just about drown out their fighting.)
But what's most surprising about the film is its glimpse into the Isbell-Shires partnership, which was going through a rough patch during its recording. (No one who paid attention to Shires' 2022 album "Take It Like a Man" should have been surprised by this.) Jones' camera catches some banter in which they argue about the grammar of Isbell's lyrics and the usefulness of a 12-string electric guitar. (Shires apparently hates them; Isbell straps on a beautiful Fireglo Rickenbacker 360 anyway.)
Later the dialogue devolves into passive-aggressive jabs that result in hurt feelings. (Isbell complains that her fiddle is too loud: "Dink, dink, dink, in my ear," he explains; "Dink?" she answers). Then comes the offhand revelation that Isbell is not going home that night, but to the Omni Nashville Hotel.
It's not much of a spoiler to say they weather this, though after finishing the record they're quarantined at home with their precocious daughter Mercy, then 4 years old. It's not any of our business how they got through it, and we might imagine that staying married is a bit like Isbell holding onto his sobriety--you have to take it one day at a time.
Shires is a fierce artist in her own right. She doesn't just follow her husband around, she has her own tours, her own music. I would imagine they spend many nights apart, and their success affords them the opportunity to live in enviable wheels-up rockstar (or alt-country star) fashion. That doesn't mean they don't have the same mundane troubles as the rest of us.
I wouldn't let anyone's camera into the inner spheres of my privacy (and I'm sure I couldn't do so and stay married) but Isbell and Shires seem to have committed to having an uncommonly honest relationship with their parasocial fans. It's part of how they've chosen to live, part of the art they make. We might trust them to tell the truth, even when it's hard. At least I do.
They don't owe us any of this; we might be just as well off if we could believe the songs were fantasies, that they weren't method-acting their way to the truth. But, for better or for worse, this seems to be their marriage.
Every marriage--or at least every happy marriage--is partly an illusion projected by people who have negotiated a strange compact. Human lives never mesh seamlessly; the rom-com fantasy of one person completing another is just that.
Nobody else finishes us off; if we're lucky, maybe we get complemented.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.